


hindsight is twenty-twenty

by adamstanheight



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst and Tragedy, Bank Robbery, Explosions, Gen, Heavy Angst, i watched monday for the second time and got sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-07
Updated: 2019-01-07
Packaged: 2019-10-05 22:34:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17333645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adamstanheight/pseuds/adamstanheight
Summary: If only he had known how many times this has happened before.





	hindsight is twenty-twenty

Whoever that woman was, he should have listened to her. After all these years tangled up in the X-Files, he should have learned by now that if someone comes running up to you and gives you a frantic premonition, you should take a breath and really think about what you’re about to do, especially when it involves a SWAT team. But instead of getting on the phone and arranging for a hostage negotiator to get down there as soon as humanly possible, Skinner has his hands covering his head, ducking behind a police car as debris goes flying. 

As soon as the deafening boom shatters the windows, he knows it’s all over. For a split second with his eyes closed, he thinks he’s back in Vietnam. He can almost hear the bullets flying and feel the hot air jungle air coating his bare skin, the suffocating wet heat that makes you drowsy and painfully awake at once. He’s all too familiar with explosions that large, and he knows from painful experience that there’s no getting out intact, let alone alive.

He should be a leader. He should be getting an ambulance for the injured bystanders, calming people down, calling his superiors. But for the first time since he was in the war as a scared young man, he’s frozen. Thoughts of his two best agents barrel through his mind like a train with its brake lines cut. 

_It wasn’t supposed to end like this. _They’ve had brushes with death as often as they were late for meetings, but despite the odds, they always came out okay. Bruised and rattled and marked as targets for the shadowy plot of the week, but okay. They weren’t supposed to die like _this. _In a shitty botched robbery. By being in the wrong place at the wrong time. They should have died as they lived: saving lives, foiling dark plans crafted by sinister characters, putting it all on the line. He shouldn't have let them leave the building. Why did he let them leave? He should have marched down to the basement himself, dragged the two of them up to his office by their coattails, and strapped them down to keep them from even stepping foot outside.__ __

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His mouth is dry. He’s going to have to call their families. It has to be him who tells them. His stomach feels as though it’s folding into squares as he imagines informing Mrs. Scully and Mrs. Mulder that their children died all because he didn’t think the situation through and let some jackasses charge into something that none of them were prepared for. 

They were always there for him, even when he didn’t deserve their loyalty. Years of staying on the sidelines and watching from afar as the two of them investigated things that most people could only imagine happening in a paperback sci-fi novel. Only helping by hindering, forbidding dangerous excursions and lethal risks, but being Mulder and Scully, they always disobeyed. He never expected them to listen anyway. 

As he slowly approaches the bank, smoke billowing out of the windows and sirens ringing in his ears, his throat tightening like a vise, Skinner thinks of his all too recent visit to the afterlife. If they had never bothered to check on him that night and put his well-being above their safety, he would have died, with his veins bulging through his skin and covered in an ice cold sweat, terrified and completely alone. As he steps through the crumbling threshold, eyes scanning the floor for what remains of his friends, he can only remember how desperately they worked to save him; Mulder frantically bolting around D.C., guns blazing and ready to do whatever it took to find the cure, and Scully, her warm hand on his freezing arm, reassuring him with a gentle smile that as long as they had him by their side, the three of them were unstoppable.


End file.
